"We killed the enemy."
"Who said they were the enemy? Not us. Not me, we just followed orders. Mac, there are no good and bad people. No enemies. Just unfortunates."
What demarcates someone as an enemy? Does the random chance of birth and geography make someone worthy of death? Is it ideology? Is it culture or something else? That bit of dialogue is taken from a scene in The Equalizer 2, a film I have not watched aside from clips on YouTube. But the first and the third are fascinatingly hokey and beautiful mainstream action flicks staring world class talent, Denzel Washington.
Denzel plays his late career hat feather. An older, unimpeachably American man. An expert, a hero. A selfless, disciplined worker. A guy, who, if he's made any mistakes, has put them far in the rear view. Individualistic. Kind. Unselfish. A mythic kind of figure tangible only in the minds of those striving toward a kind of ideal citizen. In the first film he takes on corrupt Boston PD (thanks David Harbour for that hilarious accent, makes a New England Girl proud) and the Russian Mob. We meet him while he's working at a hardware store and driving Lyft at night. He seems unbothered by the precarity those two forms of employment represents. No, no, not Denzel he is best in all things. He helps his fat coworker lose weight so he can get a better paying job as a security guard. He drives steadfastly without complaint. We of course come to learn our mild mannered Denzel was actually a particularly sharp knife in the tool chest of our beloved Federal Government's surveillance state.
The unnerving presence of fealty to a U.S imperial violence is nothing new in our mainstream cinema landscape, big blockbuster action franchises are essentially long commercials for the glitz of American military supremacy. Nor is the kind of cast iron masculinity Denzel plays to here. The two being, really, birds of a feather in the realm of American mythology. He's old guy John Wick but he was a spy instead of a hitman! And because it's Denzel Washington he is spectacular and captivating to behold as he uses his super government training to kill room full of people after room full of people at the age most people develop a series of chronic joint paints, delivering the kind of pithy threats and toning earthy moral compulsions that America has essentially pioneered. It is, as usual, played for a lustrous cool factor. The folksy and stoic Denzel fighting for the little guy. By the third movie the gruesomeness of so much death gets put under a bit more prying kind of lens. One long shot surveys a series of Denzel's kills with a kind of caution bordering on horror. And when he kills a room full of men, one by shoving a gun barrel through his 'enemy's' eye after which he shoots out the back of that mans skull to kill a mafioso, I can only take something like that as an indictment of the capacity to do something like that. As the last victim crawls away Denzel is framed in white dust rising off the ground whirling in a beam of light slicing in through the ground level window. He looks not demonic but like a ferocious angle. He can't be a man if he's an avenger with a flaming sword.
In the scene quoted at the top, Denzel sits opposite Pedro Pascal who is playing a former comrade of our hero. Someone who worked covert operations on behalf of the federal government, they are sitting across from one another at Pascal's kitchen table in his home in the suburbs. Denzel is confronting Pascal about the murder of a friend, a murder that Pascal committed to keep his neck off the chopping block for other, presumably more public, crimes. That's what the scene tells us. More broadly I understand what brought these two men to meet. Opposition. After Denzel springs his trap and catches Pascal red handed we get this exchange:
"We all got to pay for our sins."
"Oh yeah what about you do you deserve to die for yours?"
"A hundred times over."
"Alright, well, guess what? There is no sin. No virtue."
It's a near literal conflict between meaningful retribution and an easy nihilism. Both, soldiers in the same distraught conflict for a global empire. One has found himself wanting not for his connection to the empire but his moral failings (he sees) within its service. The other has coped with the displacement of existence within the imperial machinery by detonating, some might argue rightly, all a priori modes of morality. The very concept of sin is obliterates and replaced with a flat amorality. If there is nothing to atone for then there can be no cause for remorse. This doesn't cut much mustard with Denzel, whose own sense of the moral universe is itself the moral center of the film. And by extension the center of the moral universe of America in the version of itself it projects into our film and television.
Denzel's character possesses a religious determination to see sins atoned for. He is willing to corroborate his own sunken nature, he too deserves to die like his once-ally-turned-adversary. Why then does he justify himself to Pascal's character? Highlighting that he killed the enemy, not just anyone? Why does he feel worthy of death if his directives were justified? It's a nit picky thing to point out about the sequel of a late career action vehicle for an aging A lister. Maybe the scripts weren't looked over enough. But I think it highlights a kind of inherent contradiction we all live with in a country whose standard of living is derived from the violent machinations of our government. Between the sense of itself that a state projects into the world and the material reality of the devastation the state brings in the pursuit of its security, neither man can really metabolize the full scope of what disengaging from the power apparatus might mean but both are attempting, in some fashion, to craft motivation outside of it. Pascal is still a gun for the state, he's just left guilt out of the equation. In seeing the work of state sponsored violence he determines to abandon meaning. Which to me is just a way the for the will to collapse in the face of unbridled power. It's a cold angle coming against Denzel's flaming theology. Almost the perfect antidote if Pascal's nihilism wasn't so damn sinister, and Denzel so humbly willing to claim a narratively necessary kind of culpability in his deeds.
This isn't new. It's an old American line. It's the good guy with the gun. A repentant, mysterious fighter flushing a town of the derelicts and malcontents has been a staple of western cinema for a long long while. I'm thinking of Clint Eastwood in Two Mules For Sister Sarah, helping the Mexican revolutionaries flush out the French. Twained from a sense of valor by unnamed experiences in an unnamed war. It is Denzel's goodness which piques me, where the men of the westerns where often clashing with black clad sheriffs and bandit kings out of a begrudging loyalty to an ideal they had forgot, Denzel is goddamn Mister Rodgers with a Glock. Released in 2014 the first Equalizer precedes by around a decade the rise in Operator Culture, the media superstructure that has given rise to shelf bending numbers of ex-seal memoirs and a dizzying number of podcasts. The figure of the special forces operative has become, thanks to a few decades of movies and at least twenty years of videogames, firmly entrenched in the American collective imagination. The vaunted position of having 'passed selection' into a special operations unit more or less assures one a stable brand from which to build a profitable media career from. If The Equalizer were going for realism, Denzel wouldn't be killing mobsters but podcasting about how to better utilize military discipline and an affiliate link for supplements to better achieve your goals.
What makes any of these thoughts more that anti-colonial media cloud gazing is that our current American reality is so respondent to the trends of conservative reactionary internet trends. Trumps second term was built essentially off of a pot commitment to fulfilling the desires to a segment of the population obsessed with keeping the ball of shit rolling down hill, rather than asking why there's a ball of shit at all. So that's gutting all DEI efforts, reinstating the names of confederate generals onto military bases, that's forcing trans people out of the military, revoking facial hair waivers in the armed forces (a move that will largely effect black people in the service). It's having google remove black history month and holocaust remembrance day from their doodle calendar. Using tremendous governmental force to effect seemingly unimportant change over our day to day lives. Unimportant in the scope of what governments are capable of doing and the effects they can have on our day to day lives. It is tremendously important for the people who these cultural signifiers (and that is exactly what these are) push further into the margins. They are also tremendously important for the vindictive people who staked their whole sense of political destiny on making sure someone else gets fucked over. On a fear that their lives would be overrun by blacks and 'the trans' and they would cease to have any power whatever.
Trump is the president of the enemy. And I don't mean his supporters are my enemy. I try to frame my anger at people who have material power over me, not just middle class losers who hate with ever beat of their heart. I can handle them, I look right through them. They couldn't polish my boots. What I mean, rather, is that Trump is a president who defines himself by his enemies. It's telling that his tariff policy wasn't defined by certain products or industries but by countries. Companies keep paying him millions of dollars to not block their landscape altering mergers. Notably Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel got axed- Kimmel to be hired back after public outcry- by their media conglomerate bosses more or less for being if not critical of the Trump administration then at least unwilling to abide by the group-think-at-gun-point the administration is trying to impose. So again I ask what makes an enemy? And does having an enemy give moral leverage to killing them. Denzel's character is both torn up by life as a killer for the government and completely willing to abide by it's moral binaries.
I like these movies. I like rooting for a killer, for the use of onscreen violence as a way to purge my sense of societies malfeasance. For instance when Denzel see's corrupt Boston PB extorting a Mexican restaurant he puts an end to that real quick. Sure his, 'you're disrespecting the badge!' speech is a bit pat for my taste but its a catharsis, of a kind, to the idea that people are vulnerable before the law and maybe watching the law get its ass kicked has a value to it. Our politics shape our world, and our world shapes ethics. I was caught by that scene I started this piece off with because it felt like an accidental illumination of two fundamentally intertwined and oppositional ideas. One of a defeated nihilism, as opposed to triumphant nihilism, set against an uncritical morality purity. Neither of which does anything about the power structure that they're responding to. While the seemingly intractable conditions of the twenty first century, of global consumer capitalism makes the proposition of ethical clarity an increasingly shaky one, our attempts at creating that clarity Anyway, watch The Equalizer, a Denzel Washington movie is always a good time.
(In my way I left this sitting as a draft until the relevance of my political references waned. Luckily for me, and unluckily for everyone in the world, American authoritarianism has provided me with newer, fresher example of the dreadful reality of operator culture and its imitators. On January 3rd the president of Venezuela was extracted (read: kidnapped) from a location on a Venezuelan military base while Caracas was bombed. It took something like five minutes from the breach of the door for the Delta Force dudes to grab Maduro and his wife, according to The New York Times. On January 7th Renee Good was killed by a masked ICE agent. The self styled operators, who are in reality some of America's least employable imbeciles. See how they dress, the tactical pants and the flack jackets. Oakley shades and those cloth sleeves that go over their faces. Gators. Their called gators. really weird name for those. Of course people were outraged and horrified that a random woman moving her car during one of ICE's anti-human wastes of all our collective time was shot in her head three times. I don't actually know a whole lot about the incident but that is mostly by choice. My heart, and my critical thinking, tell me that arming myself for debate about the efficacy of extra judicial killings would do more to sour my humanity than to raise up someone else from the mire. A guy, a federal agent, shot a civilian woman in a moving vehicle. It's not like I need a lot of info to adjudicate this. The U. S government has stood up for the shooter. The mayor of Minneapolis, where the killing took place, told ICE to fuck off in essence but wouldn't back up the rhetoric with substantive action. The breadth of the U.S security state is expanding into the lives of it's citizens in a way it hasn't before. At this stage it's as though the lives of its citizens at large, and the things they, we, demand for ourselves, run contrary to the States sense of security. In other words, it feels like we're all targets now. )
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